I was going to recommend looking at https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/paginate-search-results.html#scroll-search-results - but it looks like that method is now not advised- but if you read up above it it looks like there’s a search_after/PIT method described which sounds similar to the article.

This is all to say - I don’t think this is a one-off concept - it’s been around for a bit.